actually his strategy fro iraq was my personal favorite: he felt, during the primary, if Iraq is gonna work, its gonna have to be a loose confederation of three separate states.
Yes, that is right. Biden is astute enough to know that Iraq is much like the Balkan states, the USSR, and Africa, which were countries that were put together from disparate cultures as client states to colonial powers.
Once formed, these countries are held together by force, sometimes brutally, and disparate groups and even bitter enemies are forced to coexist as part of the same country.
Historically, these artificially formed countries fall back into their original separate countries whose borders more closely match the original disparate cultural groups that were forced together to begin with.
This is why we once again have countries like Georgia, Serbia, and countless countries in Africa.
If you want to know what is the cost of a having a President or VP who is not good on foreign policy, or worse, rejects the expertise of those who do, then just look at the situation in Iraq. Bush and his boys were either ignorant or willfully ignorant of this lesson that history teaches us over and over again. That Bush was surprised that Iraq fell into sectarian violence once the cork was pulled on the oppressive Baath party's stranglehold is completely shameful. The Iraqui and American lives lost, both military and civilian is the direct result of collossal ignorance and a deliberate policy to go with gut instinct and ideology over the obvious lessons of history.
Any Iraqui government that is put into place will be holding Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds, all who are bitter enemies, together by force in an unnatural alliance. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that there are strong cultural forces at work tending towards restoring the region to its partitions formed around thousand year old cultural identities.
It is a crying shame that Americans are so ignorant of this lesson from recent history that all we can do is think that Biden is crazy when he simply recommends what is an already very probable outcome in Iraq.
If you want more of this kind of stunningly inept blundering foreign policy then elect the people who were working hard last week in their convention appealing to the American people that they would do a better job because of their lack of experience and the fact that the are just like you and me, rather than like Obama and Biden who actually use their brains.